Roger Howorth of IT Week reports that Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) demoed its prototype speech recognition engine for handheld devices at the Internet Show in London last week. The technology is based on a StrongARM CPU and Linux. Howorth writes . . .

“The demonstration centered on L&H's new NAK handheld device, which the firm said should ship before the end of the year. The device, which was also shown at CeBit, is built around the Linux operating system and uses a StrongArm CPU. L&H said that the device has a large vocabulary and can recognize speech without prior training — a capability called speaker independence . . .”

“In addition to the speech recognition engine, the device includes L&H's RealSpeak text-to-speech engine. The firm demonstrated how users could listen to the device read out an email, then use the speech recognition engine to create a reply . . .”